A Symbolist work drawing inspiration from Yeats and Maeterlinck, especially the latter's L'Oiseau Bleu (1905), the play deals with an injured butterfly, temporarily stranded amongst other insects, which flies away despite the cockroach's love for her.
Written at the invitation of the impresario Gregorio Martínez Sierra, it was first staged at Madrid's Teatro Eslava on 22 March 1920 with the ballet dancer Encarnación López Júlvez, 'La Argentinita' as the Butterfly and Catalina Bárcena as the Cockroach. It was not well received by the public and was cancelled after only four performances. Later García Lorca would claim on various occasions that Mariana Pineda (1927) was his first play.
The play is critically interesting for various reasons: in particular, several points of style and thematic content developed in El maleficio... would later become distinguishing features of Lorquian drama. For instance, exploration of symbolist stylization and antinaturalism, the incorporation of different art forms including music and ballet, bold attention to details of staging and familiar themes such as frustrated love and the imminence of death would all recur constantly in later works.